Every tongue confesses Jesus Christ is Lord.
Nobody escapes that. You do it willingly or you're forced. You do it now and you're forgiven and you will gladly bow in heaven. You reject Him now and you will bow one day at the seat of judgment and feel His wrath forever. Welcome to Grace To You with John MacArthur.
I'm your host, Phil Johnson. When you're telling someone about the Lord Jesus Christ, of course you want to explain accurately His greatness, His power, and His glory. But what description of the Lord is perhaps the least emphasized but most vitally important in a word? It's humility. But how is it that Christ can be high and exalted and yet low and humble at the same time? And how should Christ's humility fit into your presentation of the gospel?
John MacArthur's message today will help you answer those questions. To reinforce what you already know and love about Christ, or to equip you to communicate the truth about Christ to others more effectively, stay here as John continues his study called, Who Is Jesus Anyway? Philippians chapter 2, and I want to read the text of Scripture to you.
This is the Word of the living God, the inspired Word of God written down by the Apostle Paul but every word from God so that it is the truth as God desired it to be communicated. And in this wonderful second chapter, we read the name Christ Jesus at the end of verse 5. Verse 5 ends with Christ Jesus.
And with that name, the next important section is launched. Christ Jesus, then it goes on to describe Him in these words, who although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bondservant and being made in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore also God highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, that the name of Jesus, every knee should bow of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.
Who is Jesus Christ? He is, says the Scripture, the one who is in every sense God, but who did not regard equality with God something to cling to, but emptied Himself of His privileges, prerogatives and rights, took the form of a servant to serve the purposes of His Father and came down to become like men. But He didn't just come down to be a good example.
He didn't just come down to show us how men ought to live. Verse 8 takes it further. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross. Let me just take that verse apart for a minute.
Again, these are all critically important components. Verse 8 begins, and being found in appearance as a man. This advances the last point. Having become man, Christ was then recognized as such by those who saw Him. In the days of His flesh, as the writer of Hebrews calls it, He was viewed as a man. As they looked at Him, they saw the appearance of a man.
And that is a reference to His outward schematy. They saw that He appeared as a man. They couldn't see His deity. And so He appeared to be nothing more than a man...nothing more than that. That was the judgment of the world, that He was nothing but a man.
That's what He looked like. And that's an affirmation of His true humanity. The fact that they rejected Him as God, that they rejected His claim to deity, the fact that they thought His claims to deity were blasphemous whenever He said He was God, they picked up stones to stone Him, the Jews being so infuriated by a blasphemous claim to be God, indicates that they saw Him as nothing more than a man. He was in the true morphe of God and in the true morphe of man, but to them the God part was invisible. It wasn't that they couldn't see that He was God by His works. They couldn't know that He was God by His profound words and by the character of His life. It's that they refused to believe that and so they were left with all that they could see with their blinded eyes and that was His humanity. He appeared to the world as nothing but a man. That's still the world's primary judgment on Him. The world still looks at Him as perhaps a well-intentioned man, a good man, a noble man, a religious man, a peaceful man, or a peace-loving man, a man who wanted to help, etc., etc., somewhat misguided man, as the Da Vinci Code would put it, just a man who fell in love with Mary Magdalene and had a baby.
Another blasphemous idea. But He did appear as a man and that's testimony to His true humanity. There have been people through the years who said He wasn't ever a man, He was just a sort of floating spirit came in and out of a body. Look, they saw Him as a man, fully human.
But there was more. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself. He was already humiliated when He was born. He was already humiliated when He lived as a child and a young man.
He was already humiliated just being on this planet. He was already humbled when He came down but He wasn't humbled as far as He was going to be humbled. He didn't get down here and say, look, that's as far as I'm going.
I'm here, I'm not going lower than this. He didn't fight back. He didn't blast His rejecters and His detractors and His enemies and those who plotted His death.
He didn't fight back. Even when they took Him into the mock trials, a sequence of trials prior to His crucifixion and they had false witnesses and trumped up lies and false testimony, He never ever responded. When He was reviled, He reviled not again. He never said to God, that's enough humiliation, I'm not taking anymore. He humbled Himself below taking on the form of a servant, below being in the likeness of men, below appearing as nothing more than a man. In verse 8 it says, He became obedient to the point of death. This is something completely foreign to God.
God is life, cannot die. But the depth of this humbling, the depth of this condescension is that He comes all the way down, not just to being human, not just to being a servant, but to death. This was His ultimate yes to God. This was His ultimate act of service. God, You want me to die to pay the penalty for the sins of those who believe I will die.
This is His lowest hour. It was not a natural death either. It was an execution.
It was really a murder. It was an unjust slaughter of the Son of God. And it wasn't just death, He says going further, it was death on a cross.
And we're still going down, folks. We started down with the phrase, He didn't regard equality with God a thing to be grasped. We went down when He emptied Himself, down when He became a bondservant, down when He became a man, down when all that could be seen was His humanity, down when He comes to the point of death and down further because His death is death on a cross. And that's why the text says, even death on a cross. This is the most shocking feature of Christ's humiliation. Trucifixion, you see, was the most horrific way to die. Developed and perfected by the Persians, the Romans had picked up this form of execution.
It was the most painful, the most humiliating and the most cruel form of death imaginable. A person basically was nailed by hands and feet to a cross, a wooden cross, which was then dropped into a socket, ripping and tearing the flesh. They hung suspended like that, the body slumping and being held basically only by two wounds through the hands. The feet, usually nailed together with one nail, against a little block, had some leverage to push up so that the victim could breathe, otherwise suffocation would take place. So against the wounds and the feet, the victim hanging on the cross is pushing up, pushing up, trying to catch breath.
The sun is blazing. The mouth is parched. The blood loss through those four great wounds is immense. The blood loss through the crown of thorns adds to the horror. This is an unthinkable, inhuman way to execute people. And some people would hang like that for several days depending upon their strength and the configuration of their crucifixion. Crucifixion was only for the scum, the riff-wrath, the non-Roman citizens. The only way a Roman citizen could ever be crucified was if they committed a crime against the state.
It was hated by the Jews. They despised it because there was one occasion where hundreds of Pharisees were crucified. And the Romans had filled Israel with crucifixions. Some historians think there was as many as 30,000 people crucified around the time of Jesus. That's how the Romans kept everybody in line.
You step out of line, that's where you end up. And they lined all the highways with crosses and they stripped the land of trees to make them. No dignified person would ever be put on a cross, only the rankest of criminals, the lowest of the low, the worst of the worst. To put somebody on a cross was unthinkable. The Jews on occasion did put a body on a cross but only after it was dead, if the body was the body of a blasphemer because Deuteronomy said, cursed is he that's hanged on a tree. But they would never crucify a living person, too horrific.
It was the ultimate in human degradation. But Jesus came all the way down to that...all the way down to that. And He who knew no sin bore the punishment of sin for us. And the just one was crucified for us the unjust. And He was wounded for our transgressions, as the prophet said.
He was bruised for our iniquities. He died in our place. No one could ever imagine that God would do such a thing.
If we had planned the arrival of God in the world, wouldn't look like that, would it? We would want to make sure that He arrived in a palace, not a manger. We'd want to make sure that He was born into wealth, that He was educated in the finest schools, prep schools, universities under the most elite teachers.
We want to make sure that He was cared for and nurtured and attended to and honored and loved and lifted up and exalted and believed in. We'd never let Him be born in a stable. We'd never let a bunch of stinking low-class shepherds around Him.
We'd never let Him come into a family of poverty, a carpenter's son. We would never let God come down with no earthly goods, no formal education, and then surround Him with a rag-tag bunch of no-name nobodies with no worldly qualifications to do anything. We would never let God be that humiliated. We'd certainly never let Him be cursed. We'd never let Him be mocked. We'd never let Him be mocked. We'd never let Him be spit on. We'd never let Him be crucified.
But then we'd never be saved. This is the incarnation. This is who He is. This is why He came. The story doesn't end in verse 8, by the way, verse 9. It says this, therefore also God highly exalted Him.
What a statement. God highly exalted Him. What did God do to exalt Him?
Well what did He do three days after He was crucified? The Father raised Him from the dead, didn't He? The first point of the Father's exaltation was the resurrection.
And by God raising Christ from the dead, God affirmed the validity of His sacrifice. And He raised Him from the dead to say what Jesus had said on the cross, it's finished. And then the second thing happened 40 days later, He ascended into heaven. First His resurrection, then His ascension. And when He reached heaven, He sat down at the right hand of the Father in His exaltation. The Bible says that when He went to heaven, He sat down on the right hand of the majesty on high.
He took His place on the throne. He was exalted in His resurrection. He was exalted in His ascension. He was exalted in His coronation. And He's also exalted in His intercession, for He ever lives to intercede for all who come to Him.
God highly exalted Him. And then verse 9 says, God gave Him a name. He bestowed on Him the name which is above every name. Some people think that's the name Jesus, that's not it. The name Jesus is just like the name Joseph. The name Jesus is just a name.
That's not the name above every name. The name above every name is Lord, sovereign. And He gave Him a name which is above every name. And that name is Lord and Lord of lords.
He sat Him on the throne. Verse 10 says that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow. At the name of Jesus, the name of Jesus, not Jesus, but kurios, Lord. At the name given to Jesus, the name Lord, every knee bows. You bow beneath the Lord, which means the Master. You bow. Every knee should bow. Every knee will bow. Every knee must bow.
And He means every knee. Those who are in heaven, angels, cherubim, seraphim, ten thousand times ten thousand and thousands of thousands of angelic beings, and the saints, the glorified saints who were there, every knee in heaven bows. And on earth, men and women, they don't all bow by choice.
Some do. Most will bow by compulsion. The day will come when those who refuse to bow to Christ as Lord in life will bow to Him in judgment. And even those under the earth, demons, damned by the damned fallen angels, they bow. They bear His wrath. They feel His fury forever. Everybody bows eventually. And eventually, verse 11 says, every tongue confesses Jesus Christ is Lord. Everybody.
Nobody escapes that. You do it willingly, or you're forced. You do it now and you're forgiven and you will gladly bow in heaven. You reject Him now and you will bow one day at the seat of judgment and feel His wrath forever. The word confess is to acknowledge. To acknowledge. Every tongue will one day acknowledge Jesus as Lord. That's who He is.
He is the ruler. That is the most important confession in the Christian faith. You want to be a Christian?
Here's how. Confess with your mouth, Romans 10, 9, Jesus as Lord. And believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, which is the affirmation of His lordship. That is the heart of Christianity.
He came down that He might go up. All of this, it says, to the glory of God the Father. C. S. Lewis suggests that in a unique way, God has sort of written into our lives and the world in which we live this idea of descent and reassent that is most significantly true of our Lord. He says it's the pattern of all vegetable life. It must belittle itself into something hard, small and death-like, a seed.
It must fall into the ground and thence the new life reassends. It is the pattern of all animal generation. There is descent from the full and perfect organisms into the spermatozoan and ovum and in the dark womb, a life at first inferior in kind to that of the species which is being produced, then the slow ascent to the perfect embryo, to the living conscious life. It is so, He says, in our moral and emotional life. The first innocent, spontaneous desires have to submit to the death-like process of control and total denial. But from that there is a reassent, a fully formed character in which the strength of the original material all operates but in a new way, death and rebirth, death and rebirth, death and rebirth, go down to go up. It's a principle in life. Through this bottleneck, He says, through this belittlement, the high road is found.
And we live in a world where you go down before you go up. And certainly the greatest truth in that regard is the condescension, the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ. The question then is this, Jesus is God, the God-man who came all the way down to die on the cross, to pay the penalty for your sins. God was so pleased with His sacrifice that He exalted Him to heaven, made Him Lord over all and will cause every person who has ever lived and every angel who has ever been created to bow to Him, either willingly or unwillingly, either in the joy of heaven or the punishment of hell, everyone will confess Jesus as Lord. You do it now to your eternal blessing, or you do it later to your eternal cursing. Who is Jesus Christ?
The text could not be more clear. The question then is what will you do with Christ? That is a question that was asked. You remember the Romans leader says to the people, what shall I do then with Jesus?
That's the question you have to answer, too. What are you going to do with Him? You either acknowledge Him as Savior and bow your knee willingly, or you reject Him and one day you will acknowledge Him as Judge and bow your knee unwillingly. Join me in a word of prayer. As we, Lord, have contemplated the glory of Christ, the greatness of this Scripture that opens up for us the wonder of the incarnation, it comes right down to our lives. We pray, God, that You would be gracious to every heart here and that You would produce in them the conviction of sin and the confidence in Christ that leads to faith in His death and resurrection so that no one here will of necessity be forced to bow under the weight of divine wrath and judgment, but that all will bow under the offer of grace. And so we commend this to you in the name of Christ.
Amen. That's John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, helping you answer the vital question, who is Jesus anyway? That's the title of his current study on grace to you, who is Jesus anyway? Well, as this study is making clear who Jesus is and what He has done to redeem sinners, we received a letter recently from a young woman who desires to introduce the people around her to the Lord Jesus Christ, but she's been met with resistance. John, you have her letter there, so please take a moment to read it. Yeah, it's an amazing letter.
This is from a girl named Rebecca, and here's what she says. I'm a 19-year-old nursing student in Ohio. I wanted to reach out and express how your ministry has greatly encouraged me this past year. I was blessed to grow up in a loving Christ-centered home. I came to know Jesus as my Savior at a young age, and I have grown spiritually since then.
I started commuting to college for nursing school last year. This was the first time I had to step out of my Christian bubble and figure out how to live boldly as a Christian in a world that seems to hate Christ. I love God and feel so burdened to share how He has given me so much hope and grace, but I've struggled to know how to share this truth with the unbelievers around me. When I have shared gospel truth this past year, I've been met with laughs and sometimes hostility. I've never felt so alone. Despite the discouragement of this past school year, I cannot tell you how much your Bible teaching has encouraged me.
Almost every morning, I have to drive over an hour to nursing school or my assigned hospital. The Grace To You Sermons app, in particular, has been an amazing resource that I've used during my long car drives to fill myself with truth before a long shift or a day of classes. Your resources have helped me to be encouraged in my faith, emboldened to share truth with those around me, knowing that I could be met with hostility, but also knowing that God has the power to soften anyone's heart. Thank you so much for the resources you make available for me and other believers who strive to live boldly for Christ.
And she signs her name, your sister in Christ, Rebecca. Again, when you support Grace To You, you help minister to people like Rebecca who want to be a light in the darkness. You give them biblical truth that steadies the heart and brings encouragement and equips them to communicate the gospel. We say it every day on these broadcasts, we are dedicated to unleashing God's truth one verse at a time.
That is not a pointless exercise. Helping you understand the Bible verse by verse gives you the solid footing you need to stand strong even when you face condemnation for your commitment to Christ. Continue to pray for us. We know that God uses your prayers to energize the work we're doing. And thanks for your partnership in connecting God's people with biblical truth that changes lives.
Thanks, John. And Fred, we are able to help believers like Rebecca glorify God in the midst of trials because people like you are helping connect them with the strengthening truth of Scripture. To partner with us to help make a difference in the lives of people near and far with verse by verse Bible teaching, contact us today. You can mail your tax-deductible donation to Grace2U, Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412. Or you can express your support online at GTY.org or call us at 800-55-GRACE.
Of course, supporting your local church comes first, we affirm that. But as you are led and are able, know that your gifts will help us make an eternal difference in people's lives. Again, to make a gift, call 800-55-GRACE or visit GTY.org. Also, when you have a free moment, let me encourage you to get in touch with us, especially if John's verse-by-verse teaching is benefiting you, or if someone you know has turned to Christ in faith because of the biblical truth proclaimed here on Grace2U. And when you write, make sure to mention this station's call letters.
You can email us at letters at GTY.org, or you can write to us by regular mail at PO Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson with a question. How do you explain the gospel to someone who is enamored with the philosophy and intellectualism of the world? John MacArthur puts worldly wisdom in perspective tomorrow. Be here for another half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace2U.
